Astrogator's Logs

“She headed back east, into the gates of dawn.”
— Athena Andreadis, ending of Contra Mundum

It has become almost obligatory for bloggers to do “last year’s best and worst/next year’s resolutions” in late December or early January. Never much a fan of such lists, I will instead share with you what I look forward to in 2014. Mind you, these are concrete items – I won’t bother with “less misogyny/more equitable structures” or equivalents.

1. Greek bookstores and publishers are starting to offer e-books: water in the desert to the parched exile, book addict that is me. I will finally make a dent in the lengthy list I compiled with a longing I thought would remain unrequited. Also, I intend to renew my forays into contemporary non-US literature, with Susan Lanigan’s White Feathers high on the list.

In mystery, I have a guilty jones for the next Provincetown tale by Jon Loomis, as long as he doesn’t shear any of the black sheep milling around the goody-two-shoes Frank Coffin. In SF, much as I dislike sequelitis, I’m curious for the continuation of Up Against It by Laura Mixon (Morgan Locke), which I briefly discussed in Space Operas and Gender Shoals. It’s my fervent hope that in the sequel we’ll see much less of Geoff and much more of the troubadour troublemaker Vivian/Thondu wa Macharia na Briggs – a walking seal of approval for advanced gene splicing and a shapeshifter across all phenotypes, including gender.

ETA: And how could I forget — the conclusion of Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona comic, the only pastiche I have ever not just liked but grown attached to (though I have a bad feeling about the fate of its protagonists).

2. The final installment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. This may come as another surprise, since I made it plain how much I detested the opus in Hagiography in the SFX Age. The sole reason I’m eager for part 3 is that I’m curious if my hunch about Tauriel is correct.

I predict that Tauriel will die alongside Kili in the Battle of the Five Armies. Women are dispatched casually in (space) operas and sagas but they’re dispatched with particular glee and sadism when they dare to mate with men who are shorter, younger, poorer or more marginal than they (see: Brunnhilde, Padmé Amidala). Mind you, Kili is a Dwarf prince (though from the inferior maternal line) whereas Tauriel is as low-ranking as an Elf can be – she would be working class if Elves had such a group. But since Tolkien made Dwarves literally the children of a lesser god, you get the gist. Plus it will make the canon purists happy.

3. On the other hand, I look forward to seasons 2 to N of Elementary. The series has only gone up in my initial high estimation: Jonny Lee Miller is still a white-hot Holmes, Lucy Liu’s Watson is now an equal partner and the acerbity between the two stings like good balsamic vinegar. I could use a bit less of the pious recovery platitudes and quite a lot more of both Rhys Ifans’ Mycroft and Natalie Dormer’s Moriarty (who was far more interesting in her most recent appearance than the monochromatic and rather dim villain of the season 1 ending).

4. The concluding game of the retro-RPG Eschalon series (*taps foot*). Yes, Virginia: though of the female persuasion, I’m an avid gamer — strictly solo, multigaming leaves me colder than Olympus Mons in Mars. This finale has been long in the making, but the care put in its older siblings and the preliminary preview noises suggest strongly it will reward the wait.

5. More of the perfumes conjured by Grand Magistra Dawn Spencer Hurwitz. Dawn dedicated two evenings of sampling and measuring to make personal perfumes for me and the Copper Yeti way back when the world was much younger and Newbury Street was the abode of real art and artists. My scent is The Long Shadow, a dark elixir of opium, amber and sandalwood grounded by petitgrain; his is The Cuddly Crusader, a sandalwood/musk sharpened by bay rum, cedar and juniper berries. Dawn has since become justly famous, and I never tire of sampling the fruits from her meticulously cultivated scent orchard.

6. Sarma, the appetizer-oriented restaurant just opened by fusion wonder Ana Sortun whose departure from Casablanca was a cause for universal lamentation. The iconic Casablanca itself is now closed, another blow from which Harvard Square will not recover after the loss of Wordsworth, HMV, and all non-chain small stores that gave it distinction and taste. Sortun’s first solo venture, Oleana, ushers you into paradise (literally, since she explored and reinterpreted less-frequented nooks of Armenian, Persian and Turkish cuisine) but it’s a bit too formal. The new place promises a looser atmosphere – so my QC squad is donning bibs even as we speak.

7. The new-new wing of the Museum of Fine Arts (I can hardly wait to see Fired Earth, Woven Bamboo) and the sui generis explorations of the Peabody Essex. The latter has mounted truly unforgettable boutique exhibits – from a comprehensive collection of Joseph Cornell’s haunting box assemblages to an in-depth retrospective on Maori ta moko.

8. Delve more deeply into composers I like – from Sofia Gubaidulina to Zoë Keating (who, I just found out, has composed music for Elementary. Purr, purr). And continue picking new likes from hearing snatches of music in unlikely places, which is how I bumped into Gorecki… Radio Tarifa… Fleet Foxes…

9. A possible brief sojourn in Aotearoa. I’d like to stand on some of the beaches, glens and glacial meadows I first saw in Xena and Mr. Snacho’s photos, later in The Piano and LotR. There’s a danger associated with this: the Copper Yeti criss-crossed both North and South Island for six months in another life and is threatening to lose our passports once we’re there.

10. Reading submissions for the successor to The Other Half of the Sky. Tentatively titled Dreaming the Dark, it will focus on women scientists from cultures and futures past the “girls don’t/shouldn’t do science” knuckledragging stage, and on worlds where science is more nuanced than the standard SF binary of either hubris or triumphalism. I already have my gaze fixed on writers whose work I want to see in this compilation. You know who you are.

11. Writing a necklace of linked stories for a Spider Silk universe collection. Readers have caught glimpses of this world in Dry Rivers, Planetfall, The Wind Harp and The Stone Lyre – but these are foam flecks on a Hokusai-height wave.

12. And, of course, more interviews with cryptids, having started on a high note with a saber tooth tiger.

Images: top, scaling — yet more — castle walls (photo by Peter Cassidy); bottom, a Delta 2 launch.

“…Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.”

— Adrienne Rich, the ending of “Orion”

Nature (once a single magazine, now a constellation of suffixed clones collectively called NPG) is part of the scientific holy trinity in terms of prestige. Of course, neither Nature nor Science are above publishing (and hyping) sloppy articles they deem “hot” – as exemplified by the “arsenic” bacteria jawdropper and the ENCODE non-news. To get anything accepted in Nature, whether a peer-reviewed article, a fiction piece or even a letter is a Big Deal and the gatekeeping and power politics are geared to emphasize this core fact. I know whereof I speak first-hand: I have one (mid-author) paper in Nature, reviewed manuscripts for them, and made the short-short list for an NPG senior editor position a few years ago.

Nature and Science do the periodic “women/minorities in science” recap, though their own percentages of non-defaults remain dismal across categories (in fairness, that simply reflects larger academia). Two recent events at Nature highlight the issues of navigating life while not in the auto-approved NPG list.

The first was the decision to republish a comment in their correspondence section. What did this comment say that was so worthwhile that a Nature editor singled it out, assigned it a doi number and reprinted it? In the impeccable tradition of Larry Summers and essentialist evopsycho, it stated that bias has nothing to do with women’s lesser status in science – it’s all about the fact that they have kids. What are the author’s credentials? An internet search reveals he just graduated with a hazy B. A. from a small Texas college and his LinkedIn profile lists his occupation as accounting.

Right on the heels of this, the senior biology editor of Nature (who also handles their Science Futures where “hard” SF gets published) decided to name an outspoken pseudonymous science blogger; the two had been feuding since 2009. The blogger is a non-Anglo woman in the early stages of her faculty career, although her pseudonym was unusually transparent. The NPG editor called her “an inconsequential sports physio”.

I know neither combatant personally. I’ve dipped occasionally into the posts of the now-named blogger and also have occasionally read the uneven Science Futures short stories curated by the Nature editor (several SF authors I know had stories published there but the less said of Ed Rybicki’s “Womanspace”, the better). From parallel experiences of my own, I think the naming was the act of a settled insider who considers in-your-face criticism an affront to his self-definition – but “inconsequential” was even more corrosive. Such terms always aim to raise doubts in those of us whose legitimacy is always on trial, no matter how lengthy or weighty our credentials and achievements.

When I started publishing books, stories, poems and essays, I made a conscious decision to do so under my real name, aware of the risks and penalties of this choice (many of which promptly materialized, with significant repercussions). There is no question that pseudonymity is crucial for those at the lower end of power differentials and that real harm can come to those deemed to be “too vocal” (especially if they’re women, non-white, poor, queer or a combination thereof). I also hear the argument that knowledge should count, rather than appeals to authority – although that slides fairly often towards disdain of bona fide expertise. On the other side, there is equally no question that pseudonymity can be used to snipe without consequences and occasionally hides an impostor: recall the “endangered Syrian lesbian” who turned out to be a straight American man?

I decided to do everything under my real name because I wanted to plant a flag, so to speak. I wanted to make it clear that someone like me – an unfeminine, dark, “uppity” woman with an accent, a zero-generation immigrant who doesn’t conform to cultural gender in either her native or adopted culture – can get scholarships and degrees from Harvard and MIT, can be the PI of an NIH funded lab, can run a department, can write a popular science book, can conceive of and execute a paradigm-shifting SF anthology. All done cold turkey, without any dynasty cushioning or insider connnections. And I wanted to be able to do all my various activities without the fear of blackmail dangling over my head. I got my share of rape, etc threats with “We know your home address” notes appended to them. But I had lived six formative years in a real military dictatorship, where people, including first-degree relatives, got tortured and disappeared. Internet trolls are drooling babies compared to real secret police.

Did use of my real name restrict me? Well, I could not be a shock jock (mind you, I prefer less lazy ways of denoting disagreement than profanity). Neither could I spend much time detailing my serious health issues for extra pittypats – I find dwelling on such matters boring anyway. Did it cost me gigs and tenure? Probably, despite the lip service of both academia and the “progressive” blogosphere to the importance/desirability of diversity and outreach. Would I have done it differently, knowing what I know now? Unlikely. I don’t have the stamina or patience for creating more than one persona/lity.

In short, I wanted to live an undistracted, integrated life, where my personal could indeed be political and vice versa. By a combination of attributes and circumstances, I was able to do so, more or less. It helped that I eventually realized I would never be deemed legitimate, even if I won Nobels, Pulitzers, Hugos, you name it. My “otherness” suffices to make me Johnson’s dog walking on her hind legs. Along the same lines, the fact that an entitled insider named a non-Anglo woman scientist with intent to intimidate was vile but almost secondary: she was classified as “lesser” the moment she made it clear she was non-default.

Non-defaults are never treated as fully human. All else springs from that.

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Images: Top, Lough Eske by Brendan Alexander; bottom, yours truly by Peter Cassidy – just so there is no doubt about the identity of the author of this post.

by Francesca Forrest

Athena’s note: Francesca is a storyteller in the oldest, very best sense of the term – everything she tells looks like a hand-blown glass flower with smoky edges that leaves a whiff of warm amber in its wake. After a bouquet of stories, Francesca just published her first novel, Pen Pal, an epistolary exchange between two people from contexts that are rarely trodden in Anglophone fiction. I invited her to share the tale of its genesis with us.

Like Athena, I love tales of other worlds and their cultures. Many of hers take place in the vast ocean of deep space. Mine unfolds across the wide seas of our home planet, in the present day. One world in Pen Pal is an unknown, overlooked, floating community off the US Gulf Coast, home to twelve-year-old Em; the other is a temple-prison, in the crater of a volcano in a fictional Southeast Asian country, whose sole resident is twenty-four-year-old Kaya. Em loves her home but is curious about what lies beyond the horizon: she tosses a message in a bottle into the Gulf of Mexico, and the message ends up in Kaya’s hands.

What does it mean to become friends with a stranger, across great geographic and cultural distance? As anyone with experience of blogging knows, it’s sometimes easier to be intimate and honest with strangers than with those close to us, perhaps because we’re less bound by prescribed roles and expectations. These friendships can be a lifeline; they can sustain us; they can even transform us—and, through us, the wider world. In Pen Pal, I wanted to show this happening.

Athena asked me about the cultures involved. Em’s community is called Mermaid’s Hands. It’s a collection of house boats that rise and fall with the tide. Seen from the shore, it’s peripheral—marginal—but seen from within the community it’s whole, rich, and dynamic. It’s always irked me that “alien” or “other” cultures are so often treated as basically unchanging until the intrusion of some stimulus, when actually all societies are changing all the time. So that was something I wanted to do differently: I wanted Mermaid’s Hands to be a living, changing community, with internal tensions, strengths, and weaknesses quite apart from plot happenings.

In Kaya’s country, I wanted to show the competing narratives of the majority people and the minority people, and beyond that, to show that neither group is monolithic. It’s not enough to say, “Here are the oppressed and here are the oppressors.” Even when that pernicious dynamic is at work, it’s always worth taking a more fine-grained look at the situation.

I was continually surprised and humbled, as I did research to correct and strengthen the story, by how pale my imagination was, compared with the reality of actual human experience. I envisioned Mermaid’s Hands as having its origins among “runaways and other slippery folk who were happier on the sea than the land”—only to discover a real-life secret bayou community that came to light some 130 years ago, after a century’s hidden existence: The Manila Men of St. Malo, Louisiana, were Filipino escapees from Spanish galleons who managed to remain hidden from the mainland for a hundred years, only coming to the attention of the American public when the journalist Lafcadio Hearn (better known for taking up Japanese citizenship and sharing Japanese ghost stories) wrote an article about them for Harper’s Weekly in 1883. He wrote, “The world in general ignored until a few days ago the bare fact of [the community’s] existence. Even the United States mail service has never found its way hither.”¹

With events and situations in Kaya’s country, I was guided in advance of my writing, much more than for Mermaid’s Hands, by real-life accounts and histories. I was particularly grateful, for example, for an autobiographical account by a political prisoner in Singapore. Although no happening in Pen Pal is directly modeled on anything in the memoir, the account was hugely enlightening and affected how I fine-tuned Kaya’s attitudes and behavior (though Kaya’s circumstances and motivations are very different). As with Mermaid’s Hands, the particulars of Kaya’s country are nothing compared with true-life human experience: there’s no exercise of power, act of suppression, or form of resistance that happens in Kaya’s country that hasn’t happened in more extreme form somewhere in the world.

I should add that there are some aspects of the story that might be called magical, or magical realist. Dreams, visions, mythical ancestors—these are integral to both Em’s and Kaya’s experience, and to their conversations with each other.

More important to me than anything else in the story, though, are Kaya and Em themselves, and what their relationship represents: the possibility of friendship despite huge actual and metaphorical differences, and the strengthening, empowering, beneficial effect of that friendship. I think that’s why I wrote the story. Zadie Smith said that when you write, you’re saying, “I saw this thing—can I make you see it?” That’s what I’m asking. I saw this thing—can I make you see it?

¹Lafcadio Hearn, Lafcadio Hearn’s America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), 54.

Pen Pal is available as a paperback from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or as an ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple.

In 2011/2012, two SF works formed a conceptual pair: Morgan Locke’s Up Against It and Joan Slonczewski’s The Highest Frontier.  Both are ambitious space operas that take place on belaguered space habitats.  Both brim with originality and bravura, field a host of complex issues, portray fluid/non-binary genders, use non-Anglo settings and are as hard SF as can be (provided you don’t count orbital mechanics as the sole hard science, as genre fundies do; Locke is a chemist, Slonczewski a biologist and their first-hand expertise shows).  Both obey marketing directives: they are parts of projected trilogies and have adolescent protagonists.  In Up Against It, a sharply etched adult woman thankfully shares center stage.  The Highest Frontier is more Harry-Potter-in-space but the quirks and gender of its protagonist mostly redeem the YA concession.  The Highest Frontier got a lot of recognition, including the Campbell award.  Up Against It went by almost unnoticed.

I gamma-read these two, so I already reviewed them extensively, if privately.  This was not the case for the paired set of 2013: Deborah Wheeler’s Collaborators (a standalone) and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (first volume of the now-obligatory trilogy).  Like their 2012 counterparts, these are ambitious space operas that tackle many issues.  Whereas the 2012 two focus on can-do survival and are relatively small-scale (no galactic empires), the 2013 ones focus on colonialism and gender in Le Guin and Cherryh’s wake, but their scientific concepts are more SF-traditional.  Both use multiple narrative viewpoints – condemned as “romance cooties” in SF circles, though the technique is routine in literary fiction – and have made conscious decisions about pronoun use, of which more anon.  Like the divergent fates of the 2012 pair, Ancillary Justice got a rousing reception whereas I count formal reviews of Collaborators on the fingers of one hand.

Collaborators is obviously descended from Le Guin kernels but carves its own unique path.  Following The Left Hand of Darkness it posits the Bandari, single-gendered humanoid aliens who polarize slightly when in estrus and a bit more during gestation.  Like Le Guin (who defended her choice until she retrenched in short stories that featured Gethenians), Wheeler uses exclusively male pronouns for the species.  And similar to the settings of Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest and Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, Collaborators shows how a non-terrestrial culture interacts with a stranded human starship whose crew, bolstered by its formidable technology, forgets that they are not gods and interfere heavily in the politics of two adversarial nations.  The major conflict is nuanced by ambiguities and dilemmas on all sides and at many levels.

Wheeler’s Quaker beliefs are visible (including the refusal to indulge in charismatic saviors) and the parallels to the havoc wrought by imperial-nation interventions on earth are clear.  The alien biology and first-contact dynamics are handled unusually deftly; the narrative polyphony weaves complex melodies and harmonies.  Wheeler’s world is effortlessly immersive and teems with fully realized characters.  At the same time, the human side is conveyed almost exclusively by male characters and the Bandari occasionally leave behind them a Wraeththu-like whiff.

Ancillary Justice posits the Radchaai, a galaxy-wide dominant polity that is rather obviously modeled on imperial Rome futurized by the customary space opera panoply (nanotech, up/downloading, FTL) and replete with cultural-specific quirks to quickly individualize the groups within it – including the author’s own unabashed love of tea.  The Radchaai, the obverse side of Banks’ Culture (with ship Minds to match), share the Romans’ casual, pragmatic cruelty including the citizen privilege boundary.  Their resources permit them to animate corpses from uprisings against the Radchaai with AI “consciousness”.  The resulting constructs are used as starship crews and planetary enforcers.  These ancillaries are descendants of Cherryh’s Union/Alliance azi and of the Star Wars stormtrooper clones: essentially cheap disposable zombi.

The protagonist Breq (a now-isolate ancillary who harbors a portion of the AI consciousness of a once-mighty starship) sets out to assassinate a powerful Lucifer/Palpatine figure for reasons of personal loyalty.  So the scaffolding is a traditional revenge quest, garnished with Breq’s fraught dealings with an ambiguous ally of once high status – very similar to the currents between Ai and Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness.  Like Collaborators, Ancillary Justice shows several worlds and the complex interactions between them.  However, the characters in Ancillary Justice are far less sharply drawn than those in Collaborators to the point of blurriness and the novel contains many lumpy passages.  Also like Collaborators, Ancillary Justice switches between viewpoints, finessed by the conceit that the ship’s AI is tallying ancillary inputs in situ – a clever dodge though its execution is not entirely smooth, augmenting the murkiness (it would do better in film).

Last but decidedly not least, and a point highlighted in all the reviews of Ancillary Justice, Breq designates everyone with female pronouns.  The rationale is that Radchaai make no gender distinctions: their technology allows them biological fluidity, so that familial/client status has now become the primary hierarchy marker.  Hence Breq either cannot comprehend or chooses not to master such distinctions in non-Radch cultures that have them.

The 3.5 people who have read my writings know my views on colonialism, gender and their intersection.  It’s good to see the ubiquitous pseudo-inclusive “he” subsumed for once and it’s fun to hazard guesses at the genderings that are left truly ambiguous.  However, I think that the conflation of grammatical, cultural and biological gender blunts the story.  The former is arbitrary and would be unavoidable in many languages (it’s an acid test for true fluency).  The middle is a battleground frought with both promise and peril – but it’s unlikely that the status-conscious Radchaai would not have other distinctions.  The latter, whether one chooses traditional or novel terms, whether one adheres to gender binaries or not, is one that an advanced AI would sense, even when diminished.

One could argue that we’re seeing a carryover of Radch arrogance by a multiply unreliable narrator.  However, the fact that Breq’s inability/unwillingness to distinguish gender (which type?) is constantly mentioned, explained and defended puts it in the “protesting too much” category: it punctures the immersive membrane of the narrative, turning the device into a  self-conscious flag rather than a fully integrated (and hence submerged) core context.  It doesn’t help that the primary antagonist is given many trappings of a male/masculine terrestrial, which shows how hard it is to write truly gender-blind narratives.

Caveats aside, both the 2012 and 2013 space opera tangled pairs are intriguing; it will be interesting to see where their sequels go.  The pronoun issue is vexed, though Anglophone SF is lucky to only have to worry about third-person singular pronouns.  Melissa Scott, always a forerunner, put down five sets of pronouns in The Shadow Man way before this became the burning issue in SF that it has become.  Other writers did without pronouns or expanded their vocabulary: neologisms aside, why not press the neutral option or the third-person plural into service?  Female- or male-only are clumsy instruments to designate either mono/multi/fluidly-gendered species or cultural gender blindness.  We need different mindsets, and different words, for such horizons.

The Copper Yeti and I spent part of the holiday week on Cape Cod in what may become a custom (this is the third time we have done so in winter). We roamed Wellfleet, Eastham and Orleans, art galleries and national seashore trails, beaches and ponds.

At this time of year, the bleached bones of that sliver of land are visible – and it’s even more beautiful than its spring and fall ripeness, if possible. It is quiet, stark. It shimmers with transparent membranes and glass shards. The slightest spot of color is as vivid as the blood of Snow White’s mother on the windowsill. And there are the unexpected notes of grace: the feathery eddies of a brief snow shower lit by the cold fires of Sirius and Orion; a swan pair floating in a mirror-still lake under a bottomless girdle of Venus; the casual last-minute decision to visit a gallery and discover six Michael Whelans on its walls.

This is all I know, and all I need, of heaven.